Strip Club Donation Returned by Davis

Gov. Gray Davis hasn’t raised $43 million since taking office by turning down many donors. But he’s doing exactly that, returning a $10,000 contribution from an Upland firm that owns three Southern California strip joints.

The governor’s campaign aides made the decision Saturday after The Times asked about the donation from Manta Management Inc.

Campaign spokesman Roger Salazar said the contribution, dated April 3 and made when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-New York) was in California to help Davis raise money, “didn’t pass the smell test.”

Salazar said that Davis has a campaign worker who vets all donations, and that the governor has returned other checks, but usually before the campaign cashes them. Such decisions are made without a public announcement. In this instance, the check simply slipped past the screener, Salazar said.

Manta owns three clubs, including the Flesh Club in San Bernardino, where city officials won a court order barring topless acts in the mid-1990s, only to have it lifted in 1999.

Then, in 2000, police made several prostitution-related arrests at the Flesh Club after undercover investigators paid women working at the club to perform sex acts on one another.

In October, a state Court of Appeal threw out the charges, concluding that prostitution only applies when the person being paid actually performs with the person making the payment.

“For better or worse,” the appellate court said, “our society has developed a tolerance for a wide variety of exchanges of sex for money.... As objectionable as the performances are in this case, we are loath to find a public policy requirement that the acts be criminalized under existing law.”

Roger Jon Diamond, the Santa Monica lawyer who represents Manta and arranged for the donation, said that despite the governor’s decision to return the money, he still plans to support Davis’ reelection.

“I respect whatever decision they’re making,” he said. “There was nothing improper.”

Diamond said he had asked that Manta’s owner, Randy Welty, make the donation as a “favor,” and that he and Welty support Davis because of his environmental positions.

Diamond said that he has known the governor for years, but that Welty and Davis have no connection and Welty didn’t attend the dinner.

“It never dawned on me there would be a problem,” Diamond said.

Jeff Flint, a spokesman for Davis’ Republican challenger, Bill Simon Jr., used the opportunity to criticize Davis’ fund-raising, and noted that the governor likely would not have returned the money if The Times had not questioned its source.

“While he’s at it, he ought to return the nearly $200,000 he took from Enron and Arthur Andersen,” Flint said.

Davis has rejected calls from Republicans to return money from Enron Corp., the bankrupt energy trader, and its accounting firm, Arthur Andersen.

But the governor said he no longer takes money from many firms directly involved in last year’s energy crisis. He also has made a practice of refusing tobacco industry money.

The Democratic incumbent does, however, accept donations from a range of other industries with business before the state, from oil and telecommunications firms to gambling and alcohol interests.